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Sunday, October 18, 2009

The history program Rear Vision from Australia's ABC, responded to the media attention to Dan Brown's piece of fiction, Angels and Demons, which predominantly features the society of Freemasons. Rear Vision brought in two historians to demystify the Freemasons

If you read the transcript of the program about Freemasons, you see the discussion in interspersed with lines by a 'Documentary Narrator'. On the podcast these lines sound exalted as if they are from a movie's trailer. As a matter of fact that is what I felt and it bothered me that it was not explained. Between these hefty statements lie the explanations of the historians and in comparison they sound very timid and inconclusive.

It is with the Freemasons as it is with any social system that lies hidden. Whatever facts are available tell little, but leave much to the imagination. Such is it with Freemasons, just is it is with Jesuits, international communism, the Mafia and the CIA or Al-Qaeda. The point is that the hard facts give us so little to go on, yet suggest so much that on the subject of secret organisations the historian cannot win and the fiction writer cannot lose. In Rear Vision this is shown not otherwise.

The most elite of the podcast reviewers (and most especially in the History genre). We use Anne is a Man! as a sort of barometer for how we are doing. Anne is a Man can assume the role of THE podcast reviewer on line; no one does it as well as he does.